The startup idea came when the founders shifted to Bangalore and it became very difficult for them to set up a home in terms of furniture.The problem with buying furniture online is it takes very long for the product to be delivered and the chance of being damaged is very high. This happens because products tend to be shipped from a centralized warehouse or from a seller in one corner of the country to a buyer in another part of the country.

When Rahul Agarwal, Ranjeet Vimal and Nikhil Saraf formed MebelKart in 2012, they set out to bridge the gap between operational efficiencies and technology in India's lacklustre furniture market. Four years on, the company continues to fulfil changing demands and evolving tastes of consumers across India.

The startup idea came when the founders shifted to Bangalore and it became very difficult for them to set up a home in terms of furniture. "That is when we realized that the industry is extremely fragmented. We realized a there is a huge opportunity to make an impact," says MebelKart, CEO, Rahul Agarwal.

Currently, the market of home furnishing and décor is unorganized due to which the demand-supply gap is persistent. On one side, the gap results in customers agreeing to buy product which are expensive and not up to their expectations. On the other side, the local vendors and supplier does not have market intelligence, in terms of rapidly changing customer taste and hence, are not able to fulfil the demand in terms of design and quality.

Local designMebelKart's premise is simple- as a platform it wants to connect buyers to furniture makers and suppliers in their locality and vicinity. "Our focus on localization of supply is a big advantage we have amongst our other contemporaries. This helps us in procuring demand from customers and fulfilling through the local supply more efficiently and faster. Also, we get local vendors on platform and help them in increasing revenues and provide them with intelligence in terms of trends. Not only we have brought our logistics cost down to 3% as against 9% industry average, but our damage rate is also very low," says Agarwal.

Beyond that, Agarwal says he is not limited in his vision of providing only furniture and wants MebelKart to be the one-stop-shop for every home solution. "Our goal is to design every home in India at the most affordable prices," says Agarwal.

"With over 2,50,000 furniture products to choose from across 20,000 pin codes in the country, we have come a long way since we first started off," he adds. Initially funding the startup with their own savings, the founders got in touch with venture capitalists after getting their business model right. They hit jackpot last year in August when they raised funding from Astro Malaysia and Askme.com to the tune of $20 million.

Identifying the chinks "Things fell into place once we identified that sub-quality products and unreliable deliveries are the main problems with India's furniture market," says Agarwal. "We understood that there is a clear demand for a platform like this that will cater to all home furnishing and decor needs," he says. "Competition in this space has also grown over the years but we firmly believe that we can make great strides in this market by efficiently providing total home solutions," he added.

Targeting the huge opportunity for this kind of market in a country like India, MebelKart has been capturing customers with its overarching virtual presence. The revenue model on which the company works is through commissions received from sale of furniture by vendors on its platform. "I started using Mebelkart because I wanted buyers to find more product to ease their furniture-shopping experience" says Imraan Shaik, Business Head at Looking Good Furniture. "We are currently clocking sales of about Rs 6 lakhs a month through this platform alone," he adds.

The company also presents vendors and suppliers with reliable market intelligence and also provides them a platform to showcase their talent. It is currently working with over 2,500 partners. "I filtered many e-commerce portals but the logistic, pricing and shipping costs at Mebelkart matched my budget," says Karishma Jain of Vardhman Marketing Company, another vendor working through the company's platform. "I just feel they should shift from the shipping model to the warehouse model," she added.

HousefullAccording to MebelKart and industry estimates, furniture market in India is worth $10 billion, with the residential sector contributing the highest share at 70%. In fact, the country is all set to be a leading market for residential furniture by 2020. "The way things stand today, one is compelled to interact with multiple entities when recreating home interiors, but that is changing. We want to ease the experience of a layperson who may not know much about options that may be available to him or her. We are thus, bringing together an ecosystem that offers all this and much more at the mere click of a button," says Askme.com, Group CMO, Manav Sethi.

MebelKart says it has won the trust of over 2 lakh users on its platform. The localization of supply that they offer also helps them procure demand from customers and is yet another factor that sets them apart in the market. But the ride has been anything but smooth. "We initially faced a lot of challenges when it came to convincing furniture sellers to sell their wares online, says Agarwal." We got them on board after we started delivering products within just 2-3 days in our pilot program in Bangalore," he added.

Acquiring scale is another problem. "The biggest challenge that the company faces is acquiring scale without losing on time to market advantage," says Sethi. "Focus is another thing that is important especially in the early stages of any company. Getting a good team in place, question of whether to chase profitability or growth, managing and retaining talent etc are other challenges that needs to be dealt with on a daily basis," he adds.

MebelKart recently launched a modular kitchen category in Bangalore and will soon come out with an interior designer marketplace with collaboration with over 27,000 interior designers across the country. With yearly revenues at Rs 78 crore today, the company is wants to expand to over 200 cities, scale up suppliers to 3,000 and further add more products on its platform.